In this chapter, Lanier emphasizes two key points. First, the digital community is largely second-order expression, which is expression in reaction to someone else's creation. Instead of creating a completely new culture, this generation is just variances on past culture: "retro". Second, the new ideas that are breaking through are still products of old media, and are still designed to make money by traditional means.
- Lanier contends that the web was designed with the ideal to give everyone more opportunities and channels to be creative. However, file sharing has decimated the music industry, and all channels of creativity in Web 2.0 are inherently reactionary.
- This will, if continued unchecked, eventually lead to complete musical stasis, since absolutely nothing new will be produced if everything comes from the hive.
- Lanier goes on to talk about his friend, the guy who created the Sims and the new game Spore. He said Spore is a legitimately creative work, and should be treated as such. It's one of the rare originals in this day and age, according to Lanier.
- However, Spore is a computer game that you must pay to play, and the hive can't legally "mash-up" or vary the game and distribute it. Although it's a new idea, it still wasn't produced by the hive and thus isn't an example of a situation where the hive really influenced creativity.
CHAPTER 10
In this chapter, Lanier explores his idea that nothing created in the internet is actually, by definition, "real."
- Lanier argues that for something to be real, it "must be impossible to represent to completion." Paintings are real because it would be impossible to mimic every brushstroke or the smell of the canvas. Music created by playing an instrument is real because the vibrations that are emitted from blowing into a reed or strumming a guitar can't be replicated exactly.
- MIDI files, JPEGs, .avi video files aren't real because they can be duplicated over and over. A "dub" or "house" musician isn't making real music because it's all loops, or the same identical piece, repeated over and over. He/she is only varying other people's real creations, not making something real him/herself.
- Lanier also explains that digital expression can be broken down and mashed up an infinite amount of times immediately after its release. When this is done, according to Lanier, the original "real" creation loses its meaning because it no longer has context.
CHAPTER 11
In this chapter, Lanier's main point is that without a membrane around the creative process, nothing would ever evolve past an indistinguishable mess.
- Lanier begins the chapter with an example from genetics. He said than Earth was created, there were a bunch of genes floating around in a primordial goop. Once groups of genes formed membranes, they began to construct more complicated cells and organisms. Just like genetics, ideas need membranes around them to evolve into better and better things, according to Lanier.
- For this reason, the open source community, while perhaps more tech-savvy, hasn't really developed anything ground-breaking and innovative like closed-off business. The example he gives in Linux, the open source operating system, versus Apple, which is highly secretive of its developments and produces revolutionary products like the iPhone and iPad.
- Much like innovation, knowledge also needs somewhat of a membrane. Wikipedia has become the consolidated source of information on the human race, says Lanier, but since its information is decided by mob rule, sometimes the truth is lost. This isn't true as much with things like math or pop culture, but history and philosophy has come to be learned through exclusively secondary sources.
- Without the context of looking in different places from individual experts for information, eventually context will be totally lost. If everything is learned from Wikipedia (or, what the masses decide is true), there is no context for anything, and everything's meaning and impact is lost.
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